Dev Diary #7: Snippets

Hi everyone! Lately I’ve been fairly busy with uni assignments and the like. My mind’s especially scrambled today due to a German exam I had this afternoon, which means I’ve been thinking in German for most of the day, before sitting down and writing a blog post in English (it’s harder than you think).

As a result, progress on Ambience has been more in the form of miscellaneous snippets, rather than a concentrated effort in one area followed by an in-depth “Gamedev Grievance”-style post. But some progress is always better than nothing.

So without further ado, here’s what I’ve been thinking about this week:

Ambience effects. Perhaps the Ambiences should look a bit fancier when they’re activated – for example, I’ve been researching some Japanese symbols which could correspond to an Ambience (e.g. wind, rain, etc.) That’s tricky, though, since I don’t speak Japanese at all and don’t really want to risk messing something up. That could get sticky.

Text. The text is still too long, too complex, too boring. I’ve been trimming back on a lot of the dialogues to make them snappier and make the game more gameplay-focused.

Boss battles. I’ve been told time and time again now that the first boss is way too difficult. So I’m scaling back the difficulty of the early game in general. Level-ups are faster, cooler weapons become available sooner, and of course, that first boss is a lot easier to take on now. (Too easy, perhaps? I’m not sure. Time will tell.)

Line of sight. I’ve been getting so much pain from that silly convert-water-to-room scripts ever since I tweaked the water tiles to become marsh tiles instead of ordinary room tiles. For example, in one case I activated the Ambience of Wind and ended up with a pretty pattern of corridors (3) and rooms (4), as seen in the screenie below:
An unusual pattern of corridor (3) and room (4) tiles. That shouldn’t be happening…

That means that standing on a tile labelled “3” will make the line of sight of the player suddenly decrease – even though he’s still standing right in the middle of a room! I did eventually fix it up (see below), but dealing with it still feels like building a house of cards – you change one little thing and the whole system will come crashing down. Maybe that’ll go away with time as I slowly make the system more robust, as I’ve generally found in the past.

A nice continuous room – much better!

And, uh, yeah… think that’s pretty much it.

In future, I might post some of these snippet-like ideas on Twitter first, then compile them in a weekly post should this happen again. (Like I said, things have been pretty hectic lately… but again, some progress is always better than nothing,)